Reading Feed (July 2016)

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Long:Andrew Sullivan Liveblogs the DNC, Nights 1, 2, 3, 4 -- If you missed the coverage and are left wondering what exactly happened in Philadelphia, Sully's coverage is the most insightful commentary anywhere. And it's important, because the convention revealed a very profound shift, the Democratic response to the Trumpening of the Republican Party. But Sully explains it best, so I'll let him tell it.

Blog:Money Stuff | Gloomy Bankers and TARP Fraud -- "I say unto you that criminal law enforcement is not a good tool for systemic financial regulation, or for political legitimation, or to 'help the narrative.' It always ends in disappointment. (It is also a moral disaster to imprison people for the sake of a narrative! But no one cares about that.) If you set up an agency to go after big-time crooks, you will mostly catch small-time crooks, because most crooks are small-time crooks, particularly the catchable ones. And then people will be mad at you for not catching big-time crooks, and your protestations that the big-time guys aren't crooks will ring hollow."

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Blog:Shtetl-Optimized | My biology paper in Science (really) -- "How did I end up as a coauthor on such a thing? A little over a year ago, two MIT synthetic biologists...came to my office saying they had a problem they wanted help with. Why me? I wondered. Didn’t they realize I was a quantum complexity theorist, who so hated picking apart owl pellets and memorizing the names of cell parts in junior-high Life Science, that he avoided taking a single biology course since that time?"

Comic:xkcd | Inflection -- "‘Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!' / 'Wat.'"

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Blog:Marginal Revolution | Let them eat internet! -- "Households making $25,000-$35,000 a year spend ninety-two more minutes a week online than households making $100,000 or more a year in income, and differences vary monotonically over intermediate income levels."

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Blog:MeyerWeb | Pokéstop and Think -- "I know this isn’t tidy. In a just world, the idea of dropping Lures for sick kids [bedridden in hospitals] would be pure and right, with no potential downsides. But then, in a just world, there would be no need of children’s hospitals."

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Blog:Marginal Revolution | Kidney Gift Vouchers -- Donate a kidney now; get promised a kidney for your loved ones later. As a pro-kidney-exchange shill, I'm very much intrigued, though as someone who deeply wants kidney exchanges to work, I'm concerned about the subtleties of building institutional trust required.

Blog:Interfaces of the Word | is/ought, again -- "I have said before that 'should' is the most useless word in politics. There is contemporary obsession with what should be, in some abstract moral sense, that obscures what is, and to the benefit of no one."; this is the strain of deBoer I agree with 100%.

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Blog:Overcoming Bias | "AI as Software" Grant -- In 'worlds colliding', Robin Hanson receives a three-year grant from the Open Philanthropy Project to "analyze potential scenarios in the future development of artificial intelligence", particularly "a broad positive analysis of the multipolar scenario wherein AI results from relatively steady accumulation of software tools. That is, he proposes to assume that human level AI will result mainly from the continued accumulation of software tools and packages, with distributions of cost and value correlations similar to those seen so far in software practice, in an environment where no one actor dominates the process of creating or fielding such software." This as distinct from the case where EvilCorp creates Skynet out of whole cloth. OPP says: "While we do not believe that the class of scenarios that Professor Hanson will be analyzing is necessarily the most likely way for future AI development to play out, we expect his research to contribute a significant amount of useful data collection and analysis that might be valuable to our thinking about AI more generally, as well as provide a model for other people to follow when performing similar analyses of other AI scenarios of interest."

Blog:Is the referee process fair? -- Card and DellaVigna's research suggests 'yes'. h/t Tyler Cowen. Unrelatedly, under the same hat tip, Legacy of drug lord Escobar's pet hippos: "Police killed or locked up Escobar's drug gang, but not the hippos in his private zoo. Left to themselves on his Napoles Estate, they bred to become what's said to be the biggest wild hippo herd outside Africa -- a local curiosity and a hazard."